He groaned and cringed. "Iris, you embarrass me."
He followed her out to the lawn and watched her walk off, a swaying lovely pink figure, toward the dock. All the rain clouds had passed on, north, south, east, and west. A sapphire sky, with two planets shining in the west, bent its dry dome over the Gull Reef Club.
7
He came awake with a bodily jerk. The knocking went on, and still the voice cried, "Inside! Mistuh Papuh! You dah?" It was a woman's voice, and not Sheila's: thin, high. The seaward window was black dark; no moonlight, no stars. His phosphorescent watch dial showed quarter-past eleven.
"Inside! Inside! -Well, I guess he ain' dah."
Another girlish voice: "He dah."
Hammering of several fists, and yells of two women: "Inside! Mistuh Papuh!"
"All right, all right, one moment."
The girls-they were the waitresses in the har-told him that the hotel water had just run out. Church had noticed it, while washing glasses, and had immediately sent them to him.
"Okay," said Paperman, with some elation. For once he was on top of a Gull Reef crisis. "Tell Church he'll have water in two minutes."
The two girls ran back to the main house and he followed in robe and flapping straw slippers. In the lobby half a dozen guests in night clothes clamored at him. He raised both hands. "Folks, it's a question of shifting from one cistern to another. I regret the inconvenience, but by the time you get back to your rooms you'll have water."
Many people were drinking and laughing in the bar, all oblivious to the water crisis, and more were on the terrace, dancing to the steel band.
"Church, get the big flashlight in the kitchen and come with me. You might as well learn how to do this."
"Yes, sir."
He led Church to the malodorous hole under the hotel. The pump was running with a queer dry rattle. Paperman flashed the light beam along an electric cable, coiling in the darkness to a wall socket. He pulled out the plug. A fat blue spark leaped after the prongs; the pump choked, rattled, shuddered all over, gave a screech and one loud clank, and fell silent.
Paperman did not remember, at this point, whether the red valve or the green valve led to the emergency tank. It didn't matter, he thought. All he had to do was close the open one and open the closed one.
He did this.
"Now," he said, and he plunged the plug back into the socket.
The pump reacted like a living thing, like a bull stabbed with a sword, like a woman grasped in the dark by a strange hand. It screamed, and writhed, and seemed to rise bodily off its concrete block, and shook at every point, its gauge needles dancing. Then it settled down to running noisily again.
"There we are," said Paperman, trying to appear unconcerned, though dry-mouthed at the pump's convulsion. "Run up and make sure we've got water. Just yell down to me, I'll be out on the beach."
"Yes, sir."
"No water," Church called down from the rail of the bar, about half a minute later. "No water, Mr. Paperman. And the lobby's full of people complaining."
"Get back down here," roared Paperman.
"Coming, sir."
"Now what the hell, Church?" Paperman said, playing the flashlight on the thumping machine. "It's running, it's drawing on a full emergency tank. I checked that tank today."
Church put his hand on the pipes. "There's no water going through, sir. There'd be a vibration and the pipes would feel cool. Do you suppose the pump has to be primed? Most pumps do, once they've run dry.
"You seem very knowledgeable. Go ahead and prime it, Church."
Church scratched his beard, and looked at his employer with a weak one-sided smile. "Sir, that's one thing I'm no good for. Machinery gives me the creeps. I have a long bad history of wrecking boat engines, sir. I really would rather not touch this pump."
Both men stared at the gasping machine.
"Well," said Paperman, "I sure as hell don't know how to prime it. That was one little detail I neglected to ask about. It wasn't volunteered. I guess I'll have to find Gilbert."
The somnolent night boatman, Virgil, was sprawled in the stern of the gondola, with the hat over his eyes. He was a small very scrawny man; Paperman had been unable to guess his age because he had no front teeth and he was cross-eyed. He was constantly munching, though he never seemed to put anything in his mouth. Thor had told Norman that Virgil was nicer than Gilbert, but he had made him the night man because "he look so tam fonny."
Norman, who had thrown on shirt, shorts, and sandals, came trotting to the dark pier and stirred him up. "Virgil, you don't happen to know anything about the pump, do you?"
"Pump? No, fah. I fink Gilbert, he know." Virgil sat up, looking several feet to Paperman's left.
'Can you tell me where Gilbert lives?"
"Oh, yeff. Dat fery fimple, fah." He munched out some incomprehensible directions, in which the words "Mofquito Hill" kept repeating.
"Mosquito Hill, eh? All right. I'll find him. Let's go."
Paperman leaped out of the gondola as it drew near to the shore. A couple who looked like honeymooners were waiting hand in hand, peering toward the lights of the Club with shiny eyes. The girl said to Paperman in a babyish voice, "Is that place as heavenly as it looks?"
"It's utterly fantastic," said Paperman, "and unbelievably reasonable."
"Oooh," said the girl, stepping into the gondola with a giggle.
Paperman ran up Prince of Wales Street and found a cab. "I want to go to Mosquito Hill," he said, jumping in. "And fast."
"Yassuh. Wha' on Mosquito Hill?"
"Well, I don't know. Where Gilbert lives. The boatman from the Gull Reef Club."
The taxi driver nodded. A scary ride ensued, around corners, through alleys, up and down hills, with at one point a screeching grind backwards in blackness between narrow stone walls. The driver explained that this short cut saved ten minutes; it was all right to back along the one-way alley but not to drive through it.
At last the taxi stopped. "We dah," said the driver. "Mosquito Hill. Dat be two dolla'."
Paperman got out of the car and found himself looking at the longest, steepest flight of stairs he had ever seen outside of pictures of Inca ruins in the Andes. The staircase went straight up and up into the night, gloomily lit by street lamps clouded with moths.
"What's this? Where's Gilbert's house?"
"He live up dah. De Tousand Steps."
"The Thousand Steps?"
The driver laughed. "It just a name. Dey ain't but two hunnert seven. Gilbert he live up near de top. Goat Row. You ask anybody up dah."
"Can't you take me up to the top so I can walk down?"
"Yes suh. Dat does take twenty minutes longer, you does have to go way round Gov'ment Hill and den de ole Jewish cemetery in between."
"I'm glad to know about the Jewish cemetery," Paperman said. "It may come in handy. Wait here for me, please."
"Sho."
Norman contemplated the steps. On the list of overexertions which his doctor had ordered him to avoid, climbing stairs had stood first, underlined in red ink, ahead even of "excessive sexual activity." It crossed his mind that if death had to come, he was not committing the misdeed of choice. Nevertheless the pump of the Gull Reef Club had to be primed. He began to mount the Thousand Steps.
The steps were lined with shacks of tin or wood; here and there were stucco structures that might be called houses; all presented blank walls or narrow high windows to the stairs. Where the street lamps stood, alleys ran off into the darkness. The signs on corner dwellings gave the names: Jensen Alley, Old Church Mews, Spanish Row, Simon Row. Garbage filled deep cement gutters bounding the stairway. Garbage removal on this hill, Norman saw, was done by the rain and by scavengers. The short storm at sunset had washed much of the refuse down to the large heaps where the taxi stood, and the rest lay tumbled along the cement trenches. Cats and dogs and a few small black goats were busy at the smorgasbord, all the way up the hill. The gutters were choked with broken bottles and punctured beer cans, stuck in a permanent black mulch, which diffused a smell of fetid decay on the hot night. Paperman tried to subdue his gasping as he mounted. He was less likely to die from the climb, he felt, than from inhaling this miasma. He paused to catch his breath at a broader alley than the rest, discouragingly named Lower Street. Here on one corner was a tiny tavern with glassless windows and unpainted little tables, where yelling, laughing, muscular black men in undershirts were drinking beer out of cans. A bit scared, Norman searched their faces. The men became quieter, and gave him truculent looks. ,
"I'm looking for Gilbert," he panted. "He works for me, and he lives in Goat Row."
After a pause of vacant staring, a man in the doorway shouted inside, "Hey, wha' Gilbert?" There were many noisy answers. He pointed up the stairs. "He up dah. He gone to sleep."
Paperman climbed; climbed till his head swam and his ears sang; climbed until the sign Goat Row loomed at last before his misting eyes. He halted, clutching at the stitch in his side, and gulping the air, which here, near the top, was sweet. Glancing behind him, he grabbed at the lamppost to keep from plunging dizzily head first down the gulf of steps to the shrunken taxi. There was a charming vista from this spot-the close larnplit town hills, the far curving waterfront, and the tiny gem of the Gull Reef Club-but Paperman was incapable of admiring it.
Goat Row was dark. His watch showed a few minutes before midnight. Far down the alley to the left he saw one light. He made for that, gasping like a stranded fish, stepping in squashy muck, kicking unseen tin cans, and once treading on a thing that writhed and made no sound. A stout woman sat in the lighted window, reading a worn little Bible. "Gi't-bert?" she said. "Gilbert de next side de stairs, de red house."
Nothing looked red in the dim lamplight on the other side of the stairs. Paperman went striking matches from house to house, examining the paint on the walls. It occurred to him during this peculiar activity that he was quite a long way from his home, his wife, his daughter, and Sardi's Restaurant. The muck was especially thick here, and he felt it oozing warmly over his sandals.
"Wah you want, mon?" A flashlight from a window dazzled him. Before he could reply the voice altered its tone. "Mistuh Papuh?"
"Is that you, Gilbert?"
"Yazuh. Mistuh Papuh, I kin work dat cash register just like Thor said."
"I'm sure of that," Norman panted, "but it isn't what I came to see you about." His hand pressed to his galloping heart, he described the trouble with the cisterns. The light beam shone full on him as though he were doing a vaudeville act.
"You does have to prime de pump," said the boatman's voice through a yawn.
"So I gathered, and how do I do that?"
"You does pull de plug, den open de petcock, den take de spanner by de sump, den you does unscrew de vent nut, den you does pour in some water from de bottle by de sump in de pump, den-"
"Gilbert, listen, you'd better come and do it."
"It don' take but two seconds, Mistuh Papuh, dey ain't nothin' to it."
"May be, but my guests are rioting by now. I can't take a chance. I'm not climbing these steps again tonight."
"Yazuh." The flashlight snapped off, leaving Paperman half-blinded, still gasping, and up to his ankles in warm slime. The shadowy form of Gilbert came out of the house, and headed toward the staircase. Norman observed that the boatman hugged the wall, walking on a narrow stone curb, to avoid the mud.
There were great advantages he thought, as he staggered back to the Thousand Steps-advantages he had never before quite appreciated-in knowing one's surroundings.
About a quarter of an hour later he stood with Gilbert in the crawl space, flashing lights on the dead pump. Church was above, checking out two irate guests and trying to calm a mob in the lobby.
"Okay, Gilbert. Let's see how you do it."
Gilbert took perhaps a minute to bring a happy far-off shout from Church, "Water! There's water, sir!" All he did was unscrew a nut, pour a little water from a dirty bottle into the opening, tighten the nut, and plug in the pump. The machine came to life with its usual hysteria, but when it calmed down its thump was full and throaty.
He rehearsed the pump-priming motions with Gilbert half a dozen times.
"Gilbert, you're entitled to overtime for this," he said as they came out on the starlit beach. "You'll get it. Thank you very much."
"Mistuh Papuh, dat be all right. Thor he done show me de books and how to work de register. I does mix good drinks. I make brandy Alexander, de folks from up de hill does like dem, and sloe gin fizz and like dat."
